PREFACE.

PART I.

Ir is a well-known, and yet remarkable fact, that from the higher description of schools in this country, both public and private, an ENGLISH DICTIONARY, and, from the former also, an English Grammar, are books that have hitherto been excluded. The Grammars of the learned languages have been the only introductions to a grammatical knowledge of our own speech, and the practice of rendering from a dead to a living tongue, and back from the living to the dead, has been the sole scholastic introduction to an acquaintance with the significations (as they are called) of English words.

The reason for the non-admission of a Dictionary may have been, that our literature has not yet produced a work that could, in any material degree, contribute to the improvement of a student, who had made any progress in his course of classical learning; much less to the discipline and exercise of his mind in the completion of a liberal education.

The only work, that even professes to comprise within its plan that degree and that kind of knowledge, which are demanded for youth of riper years, is the Abridgment of the Dictionary of Dr. Johnson. Why, it may be asked, is not this Abridgment a common manual in our schools and colleges? One reason unquestionably is, that it has not the slightest pretension to the character of a book in which the words are deduced from their originals, and their different meanings explained; and another, that it is burthened with an accumulation of matter which can serve for no other purpose than to perplex and mislead.